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Another Spin of the Wheel

By Stanley Fish June 3, 2007 10:05 pmJune 3, 2007 10:05 pm

In the past year I have come to expect that the respondents to these columns will be learned, eloquent and precise in the articulation of their positions. (I have also learned that, no matter how remote the connection, they will be able to use whatever I write as a springboard to a denunciation of the Bush administration.) But my expectations were exceeded by the comments posted to my last piece on the impossibility of avoiding “spin” in a world (our world) where perception and expression necessarily proceed from some angled perspective or point of view. With passion and precision (and often at some length) the authors of these comments alerted me to at least two mistakes.

The first is the more serious: I was using the word “spin” in two different senses and my failure to distinguish between them led to a slippage in the argument of which I remained unaware until it was pointed out by literally dozens of readers. One sense of “spin” – the commonsense sense that is the subject of Brooks Jackson’s and Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s new book, “unSpun” – is the effort to deceive either by omitting relevant facts or by drawing suspiciously large conclusions from small amounts of data or by regarding disputed evidence as authoritative – or by any of the hundreds of other techniques by which someone labors to “put something over” on someone else.
The other sense of spin I employed in the column is more philosophical: it is a response to the argument, made at times by Jackson and Jamieson, that one antidote to deception – either deception imposed by others or the self-deception imposed by one’s own desires and inclinations – is to carefully monitor one’s own thought processes and to be especially alert to the human tendency to “embrace information that supports our beliefs and reject evidence that challenges them.”

Jackson and Jamieson cite as a cautionary example a group that had gathered to await the appearance of a UFO that would rescue its members from a flood of biblical proportions. Neither the flood nor the UFO arrived, but, rather than abandoning the convictions that had led them to the prediction of both, the faithful “became even more committed to their cause after seeing what any reasonable person would conclude was shattering proof that they had been completely wrong.” What they should have done, say Jackson and Jamieson, is reduce “ their dissonance by abandoning their religious beliefs.”

The model here is of a mind stocked with beliefs and an independent world the facts of which could serve either to confirm or disconfirm them. They believed X, but then Y happened (or in this case didn’t happen), and the rational (reasonable) thing would have been no longer to believe X. In the original column I challenged this model and asserted that facts, rather than standing in a relationship of distance to belief – a distance that allowed them to perform the service of check or correction – were a function of belief. That is, the facts of a situation are not just sitting there waiting to be spotted by a perceptive apparatus free of biases and prejudices; the facts of a situation will take the shape they do – will become facts – by virtue of the grounding beliefs of interested observers ( there are no other kind). That is why the leader of the group in Jackson’s and Jamieson’s example declared that the “cataclysm had been called off because of the believers’ devotion.”

In a different, but structurally similar, scenario the failure of a predicted messiah to appear would be taken to mean (and has in history been taken to mean) that the faithful had been judged unworthy. If the belief is strong enough, if it is the cornerstone of one’s world-view, it will be no trick at all to re-characterize facts that others might see as a devastating challenge to it. (Thus in his “On Christian Doctrine,” St. Augustine advises scripture readers who find parts of the Bible pointing a bad moral to work the text over until “an interpretation conducing to the reign of charity is produced.”) We don’t “embrace” information that supports our beliefs; we see the information delivered by our beliefs.

And it doesn’t have to be a religious belief that is productive of facts confidently seen. Many who raised objections to my argument were especially bothered by what they regarded as my letting Karl Rove off the hook when he cited a statistic to support his claim that under President Bush the United States economy had improved. It was their belief that anything Karl Rove said was a lie – “a statement is a lie if it comes out of Rove’s mouth” – and it is within that belief, unshakable by anything offered as counter-evidence, that they will assess an analysis of a Rovian utterance, mine or anyone else’s.

But why not come to a situation with no beliefs, or with the beliefs you have held in abeyance or bracketed, and take a good, hard look at the facts? Aside from the point I have already made (that any facts we look at will be available and perspicuous only from the perspective of some belief or other), what is it exactly that we would be looking with? Unless there is a corner of the mind that observes purely – and if there were all disputes could be settled by just going to it – we can only look with or within the convictions that anchor our minds and provide the possibility of judgment. It is within a conviction or belief that some assertion or description will seem to us to be right or wrong, adequate or inadequate. Absent a belief that grounds it and gives it a direction, the mind would be rudderless and incapable of going anywhere.

That is what I meant when I said that an open mind was an empty mind. There is of course a perfectly good and uncontroversial sense of having an open mind: being receptive to new ideas in the hope that we might learn something or revise an opinion (see comments #125 and #129); but even that possibility will be shaped by the opinions we already hold, for it is from their vantage point that an idea will be received as new and worthy of consideration. Open-mindedness, insofar as it exists, is itself a constrained condition. There is no such thing as really being open-minded Again this is a distinction – between open-mindedness in a perfectly ordinary but uninteresting sense and open-mindedness as an epistemological state no human being could achieve – that I failed to articulate, just as I failed to articulate the difference between spin as deception and spin as the name of our inescapable condition, and for these failures I should certainly be faulted.

And as for reality, it is not subjective (a word I never use); it is out there prior to any of our efforts to describe it. But what we know of it (a knowledge constantly changing as our descriptive vocabularies change) will only be known through the medium of our descriptions; and disputes about it will be disputes about the adequacy of different ways of describing, again without the possibility of something that is not a challengeable mode of description settling the dispute once and for all. And the search for truth? It is the business we all should be in, but it is a line of work that can only be pursued within the linguistic and technical resource history affords us. There is an absolute truth, but short of achieving a point of view that is not a point of view–achieving, that is, godhead – it cannot be absolutely known.

The bottom line is that it is no contradiction at all to assert the firm existence of fact, truth and reality and yet maintain that they can only be known within the human, limited vocabularies we have built in the endless effort to get things right. Truth claims are universal, but their justification and elaboration take place in time and within revisable, contingent discursive structures.

This is hardly a new insight. Thomas Hobbes put it this way in his “Leviathan” (1651): “True and False are attributes of Speech, not of Things. And where Speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood.” That is to say, our judgment as to whether an assertion is true or false will be made by seeing how it fits in (or doesn’t fit in) with other assertions the truth of which are, at least for the time being, warranted. We do not compare the assertion with the world but with currently authoritative statements about the world. The world itself – unmediated by any system of statements – is forever removed from us. As Richard Rorty says, in an update of Hobbes, “The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not” (“Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,” 1989). The world, Rorty adds, does not have its own language, does not make propositions about itself. We do that, and it is the propositions we hazard, not the world as it exists apart from propositions, that we affirm, reject, argue about and believe in.

If that is so, propositions – assertions that this or that is or is not the case – are the vehicle of thought and Hobbes can be emended to say, “where Speech is not, there is no Thought.” Words come first and make thought – propositions – possible. This is what I was getting at when I said we can’t think without them. I should have added (another failure to clarify) that by thinking I meant making propositions about the world. I was not thinking about the kind of thinking (if that is the word) that goes on in music or dance (see comments #79, #108 and #129). Fortunately, I was rescued from my imprecision by S. Mckenna and Ben Murphy, who make the point I should have made: “‘thought’ here is being used in the Fregean sense of something that can be true or false, something that can serve as a premise or conclusion in a deductive argument.”

And finally there is the matter of George Orwell. Kenny asks that I back up my judgment that “Politics and the English Language” is a silly, terrible essay with analysis and reasons. Well, that would take more than a column, but I could just cite Orwell’s advice “to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning clear as one can through pictures and associations.” I had thought that the last word on this fantasy had been written by Jonathan Swift in “Gullliver’s Travels.” Swift describes a society so distrustful of words that its members carry packs upon their backs, and when they want to communicate they just pull out things and point to them. (Try that with a Hummer or a big-screen TV.) James Johnston predicts that in 50 years people will still be reading Orwell and I will be just a footnote, if that. That sounds right. George Trail wonders what I think of “1984”. I think that “1984” and “Animal Farm” and many other writings by Orwell are accomplishments way beyond my abilities. I also think that “Politics and the English Language” is way below my abilities.

It’s an intriguing proposal that what are called facts are always influenced by beliefs, so they are always subjective perceptions, but of course that raises another question. I think you suggest that people have an a priori set of beliefs, which then guides perception, which guide behavior. If that were the case, there would be only some brief period for belief formation, after which everything would follow that trajectory. Maybe some people do think that way, but I doubt that it’s common nature. Wasn’t this already tested with animals? Didn’t animals respond eventually to conditioning by basically being creative and asserting more autonomy? Others of course have transformations and radically change beliefs at various points in life. Maybe if we separate the ideas: the people waiting for UFOs had reached a point of delusion (argue what side you take on religion), while comfort may better explain people who seek messages (t.v., magazines, books, etc) that reinforce their current set of beliefs and predictions about what will be good in the future. Either that or I totally misunderstood the fact of what you wrote, in part because of my current beliefs.

Early on in your essay, I was reminded of Augustine’s dictum, Credo ut intelligam, or Believe in order to understand. I think you sell skepticism of the sort recommended by Richard Feyeman short, when he said “The easiest person to fool is yourself.” It is this sort of cautious skepticism that prompts double blind experiments as a guard agains seeing what one believes, on the basis of a favored hypothesis, ought to be there. I quite agree that getting at facts is tough, but to have facts “become facts by virtue of the gounding beliefs of interested observers” smacks too much of Augustinianism.

Interestingly, while “Politics and the English Language” urges us “let the meaning choose the word and not the other way around,” “1984” shows a government trying to prevent people from thinking subversive thoughts by removing the vocabulary with which they could do so from the language. I haven’t read the book in a long time and have no memory of what judgement Orwell as an author was making about the plausability of such a project, but I would be curious to know what Mr. Fish makes of it. Orwell certainly appeared eager to explore the implications of the idea that “words come first and make thought – propositions – possible.”
Admittedly, it seems easier to think wordlessly about an apple or a Hummer than about freedom or treason, but does Mr. Fish think that it would be impossible to do the latter if we for whatever reason hadn’t learned those words?

Thank you, and thank you again for your explication of open-mindedness, and the difficulties encountered along the way to a fair-minded analysis of all types of discourse, and especially political discourse.

With regard to analysis, it’s a shame that rhetoric’s got such a bad rap and is so rarely taught in schools. Rhetoric not only gives individuals the tools necessary to craft persuasive arguments, but it also enables listeners to spot the gaping holes in the arguments and ideas of others.

Most of this column is a rehash of Nietzsche’s claim that all we have are our interpretatons. What is specious about this deconstructive claim is that it omits a most important fact: THE WORLD JUDGES OUR INTERPRETATIONS. as a result neither truth nor value are relative. Relativism is self-refuting since the unasked question is always: RELATIVE TO WHAT? It is within the answer to that question that one finds the source and corrective of ‘SPIN.’
joseph grange

I think it’s worth noting that there is indeed a form of thought without words; it’s commonly called “daydreaming,” and for myself (and, by report, most who make extensive use of this particular mode), it can be an uncommonly fruitful method. Albert Einstein’s famed “thought experiments” are a particularly cogent example.

Granted, words are required to analyze the results, not to mention communicate them — in my case, at least, a vast number of words, as I am by profession a novelist — but the initial process is unquestionably pre-verbal; when the words come first, one tends to produce an argument, rather than a story.

The “truth claims” of fiction are of a particular type, as well — a provisional, subjective sort: not that the facts as stated are true, but only that they feel true.

This element of “it feels true” is exactly, I believe, what gives the deceptive style of spin its power — and the complementary, presumably “honest” style of spin its power to deceive the spinner himself.

I won’t try to untangle the “logic” here. Hobbes actually refutes Professor Fish’s essentialist, if languageless, postion.
The reasons for the attack on Bush, however, cannot be attributed to “spin.” People who perceive Bush’s radical destruction of the Constitution and our place in the world and who also perceive the quest for power on the part of timid politicians like Hillary Clinton have grown desperate. This is not spin. This is an admittedly often over-the-top response to the disconnect between the perceptions of many of us and the political “leadership” we are getting from those who should be articulating many of our positions.

You would clarify things a little more if, in discussing the universality of subjectivity (though you refuse the word), you indicated that all statemetns, indeed all thoughts, rest on assumptions. That is the weak foundatiuon of even the grandest systems of thought. E.g., God is good–but what is God and what is good? God does not exist–what is God and what is exist?

While this may seem implausible, a deficient diet may make someone more susceptible to various forms of spin. Consider the FBI fraud arrest rates by state for 2004-05. Fraud as defined by the FBI is, “the art of deliberate deception for unlawful gain.” If one correlates fraud arrest rates with hundreds of other variables, it is quite amazing that fraud and its cousin forgery correlate more strongly with nutritional data than anything else. No other categories of arrest rates have any correlation to the percentage of a state’s population receiving proper nutrition.

Think about it. If one goes without fruits and vegetables for a couple months, it’s possible to lose the ability to “monitor one’s own thought processes” and thus becoming susceptible to being convinced of almost anything.

I am a mathematician. While people say it is possible to lie with statistics, it is also possible to prove the lie is a lie. It is usually possible to see the truth or falseness of a mathematical proposition. For example, in 2000 we were told that the group of married people paid more income tax than they would have if they had been allowed to file as single persons. This is simply false. There is no way you can look at it to make it true.

To move to a different matter, I would propose that the ability of people to convince others of provably false statements is due to the prevalence of faith, the ability to hold beliefs that that are not supported by facts or even contradicted by facts. This enables the believers to use that remarkable logic construct called a “leap of faith.” Most people are taught when very young to have faith and they continue this practice through their lives.

To read your analysis, you make it seem as if each object of proposed belief is its own isolated categorical syllogism, and that the citizenry have the time and inclination to treat them as such. That would constitute throwing out previous perceptions for each new case to be contemplated—like being instructed to ignore certain inadmissible evidence in a trial. Very un-species-like.

I learned some interesting lessons studying with Dr. Robert Cialdini as relates to social influence. In fact, your example of the people waiting for alien rescue from this world is illustrated in his book “Influence: Science and Practice.”

I submit for consideration a few of these ideas. Cialdini posits the notion that there are three classes of influence practitioner (sleuths=knowingly ethical, bunglers=unknowingly accidental, smugglers= knowingly unethical.) I also learned about how we all use heuristics (increasingly) to cope with information overload. Heuristics (rule of thumb short-cuts) rely on our ability to trust data. Once violated, a switch is flipped and heuristics continue to operate just fine, with a negative filter for associated incoming data. So if a trusted public servant is caught in Goebbels-esque machinations, then we will (without much effort on our own part) activate the appropriate circuitry.

Your suggestion seems to be to exit Aristotelian instruction regarding informal fallacies of logic, and treat each case in serial fashion as if they are each independent formal arguments, aka categorical syllogisms. Wow, interesting non-real-world framing.

Cialdini claims 6 universal principles of influence. I have seen other lists as long as 35. As relates to perceived deception, Ciladini offers a litmus test: 1) identify the influence principle being invoked, 2) determine if it was used ethically, that is—is the influence tactic based upon a valid foundation within the context of that circumstance. This can be trickier to sort out than it sounds, but it gets easier with practice. The point is this—once a smuggler is identified, it can often be “game over” with auto invocation of the “fool-me-once” heuristic.

The messiah not coming is a pretty standard scenario of study—sometimes under the universal influence principle of personal commitment. Check the Korean Conflict studies about American POW’s, or maybe even the Jim Jones story.

So my point is this: Hobbs is the wrong direction for this line of contemplation. Too philosophical, in my opinion. Look instead to social science, and I believe we will all learn more from this thread.

Rove, when he states that americans are doing better, is distorting data. Now, it might be the case that he doesn’t realize he is because for him “americans doing well” means he and his friends doing well…but it doesn’t change the fact that the data does not support his statements.

As for the more basic philosophical point: this is certainly a position held by some philosphers, but coherentism (which I take it, you are a proponent of some form of) is not the orthodoxy it once was.

Not that I have any problem with you holding such a position, but I think it would do your case some good to take more of the tone of an argument about why truths “hang together” rather than stating that “this is just the way truth works”. Many philosophers would beg to differ.

It is unfortunate that philosophy of this sort is unacquainted with the elementary tenets of probability theory as used by all scientists. Bayesian reasoning never comes up with yes or no answers. The subjectivity of belief lies in what probability cutoff one assigns to belief vs. disbelief. The logical consistency of Bayesian reasoning would do much for such debates. It would shorten them considerably and make them intellectually rigorous. Prof. Fish is usually a delight to read but the needless meanderings of the present discussion are a little tedious.

As a youth, I believed that people who did things that seemed irrational to me were simply crazy. It took me a long time to come to the realization that I do not “live” in the actual world, but in a construct of the world of my own making.

Why this is so isn’t a burning question for me, but I suggest that it is because there is just too much “out there” for the human mind to assimilate, and so we all pick and choose those meaningful bits that together come to make up our world, and essentially ignore all the rest. (An example of what I mean is how, once you have bought a yellow convertible, all of a sudden you notice many more yellow convertibles than you ever had before.)

This construct – let’s call it a worldview – is a lot like a gated community: only members of the community, or outsiders they choose to invite in, are allowed entry. A community down the road that has very different members and different criteria for allowing visitors, will seem alien, or if different enough, crazy.

It took me a very long time – much longer than it should have, well into adulthood – to understand that when (for example) vast mobs of Arabs in the Middle East are screaming “Death To The Great Satan, America,” they aren’t just a bunch of crazies. They are only crazy in my worldview; in their own they are acting appropriately and with complete justification – or as much justification as a mob anywhere can claim.

It took me even longer to acknowledge that (to switch analogies) my worldview is like a single plate of food selected from a vast buffet table, and any other plate of selections from that buffet is just as valid, and of course just as real, as mine. Now, you can argue about the nutritional value or taste or suitability of one plate over another, but you can’t say that one plate – one worldview – is more or less real, or even more or less valid than another.

I have no problem with the proposition that these constructs we create for ourselves are linguistic. Even though I am a visual artist, I access my work, and understand it through language – or at least it seems to me that I do. I’ll leave that question to others and be satisfied that my construct includes a reasonable degree of skill and pleasure in reading.

And if my “spin” leans toward the “a statement is a lie if it comes out of Rove’s mouth” end of the spectrum, it is because I believe that Rove and the other members of the Bush administration don’t share my distinction that constructs – worldviews – other than their own could possibly be real.

Today we recognize different learning styles: some learn best visually, others verbally; some learn best by proceeding from specifics to generalities, others in the opposite sequence. An excellent treatment is

It is clear from his essay that Orwell was a visual learner who likes to go from specifics to generalities. It’s also pretty clear from Fish’s essays that he’s a verbal learner who likes to go from generalities to specifics.

Fish seems to find Orwell “silly” and “terrible” simply because Orwell has a different learning style.

As for the carrying around of a Hummer, remember that Orwell said it’s best to start off with the visual and the concrete, not to end up there.

In fact, contrary to #13, Bayesian probability theory is well known to all contemporary philosophers of science and epistemologists and is extensively discussed. As with the other magic bullets aimed at the difficult problems in these fields, it turns out that it solves some problems while creating a host of others.

It is always so affirming to read someone else who things about how do we know that we know what we know and so many people who understand enough to respond. But in this current release I am struck by how many people are stuck in the idea that words are the only images they think in rather then a more general and abstract symbolism as well. That shape, spacial extent, continuity, time, and ordering are also symbols as well. And if I remember right many of these things are studied in psycology as well as Plato’s Ideals.

First off, let us praise Stanley Fish for doing (without indictment or Congressional hearing) what so few House officials are able to do: acknowledge fault, recognize correctors, and offer new clarifications of what he meant. This quality sets him apart from conservative partisans on this very page.

Is Professor Fish surprised we tenacious respondents will “use whatever I write as a springboard to a denunciation of the Bush administration.” If you write about spin, let’s not mince words: never have so few offered so much spin (nay, outright deception) to accomplish so much and stay in office so long. Indeed, this administration has raised spin to a new orbit — spin for spin’s sake — for how else does one explain outrageous mendacity as follow up to unsuccessful lying?

Who brought up Karl Rove, anyway – and provocatively as a reliable source on economic achievement? Classical rhetoric teaches us that one’s authority is a core objective, determining how seriously listeners take all subsequent claims.

In any case, I cannot take seriously Mr. Fish’s claim for “an absolute truth,” if knowable only by an objective point of view, beyond humanity, called a godhead, otherwise it “cannot be absolutely known.” If poor humanity is restrained by language to think and to communicate, how in the world, short of a leap of faith, can a seeming rationalist like Mr. Fish (asserting reality is “out there”) know (in any meaningful way) what is “absolute,” let alone “true”? I find it hard enough to understand why a huge majority in a nominal democracy cannot force leaders to extricate us from an absolutely true nightmare called Iraq, just to complete the circle.

What you term “of course a perfectly good and uncontroversial sense of having an open mind: being receptive to new ideas in the hope that we might learn something or revise an opinion” is NOT – as you go on to assert in the same paragraph – “open-mindedness in a perfectly ordinary but uninteresting sense” NOR is this common-sense notion of open mindedness entirely separable from or unrelated to the notion (or perhaps it is only an ideal, a dream, or a delusion) of “open-mindedness as an epistemological state no human being could achieve.”

The intimate relation of these two senses you would confess to having conflated is at the core of what drives scientific understanding. For science to proceed, one must develop a habit which is neither easy to acquire and maintain nor of “uninteresting” import, of being willing to see or interpret certain evidence as defeating one’s hypotheses. The tendency for a scientist to “see” experimental results through the lens of his or her theoretical assumptions or favored hypotheses is simply one among countless cases of the sorts of conceptual limitations to which you refer and which determine how we “see” or interpret our experience and thus, among other things what we count as evidence. But to the extent that a scientist’s attempts to achieve a state of open-ness to refutation fail, science as we know it fails. At some point, the unwillingness to recognize certain evidence bumps up against a harsh reality. (As Wittgenstein would say, “a bridge collapses” regardless of our unwillingness to interpret the evidence that it would not stand.)

Since the pursuit of science (at its many historical stages of evolution) has served as the paradigm for epistemological speculation since Aristotle, it is also impossible as a matter of history to separate the ideals of science from the philosopher’s dream or delusion of a frameless or spin-free point of reference.

The rigorous scientific model of open-ness to refutation was neatly summed up in Nietzsche’s slogan: that it’s “not about having the courage of one’s convictions, but rather the courage for an ATTACK on one’s convictions.” This represents neither an easy nor a fatuous ideal. But arguably it distills the essence of a life (whether in science, politics or any other endeavor) spent striving to be “unspun” and open-minded in BOTH of your senses.

Class enters auditorium. Question – “WHO BELIEVES IN UFO’S?, WHO DOES NOT?, WHO IS UNDECIDED? Instructions – Please devide yourself up. All those who believe in UFO’s sit on this side, all those who do not, sit on the other side. So the rest don’t know, undecided? Please sit in the middle.

“We are having a debate on UFO’s today. Each side will argue their topic with facts and convictions to prove their point. Our debators are from the English debate team who know their topics well, and this will be our class for today.”

1 hour of debate follows.

Instructions (at end of debate)- Now,all those on this side, who have changed their mind, please move to the section you now belong. wait. Now, all those in the center who have changed their mind, please move to the section you now belong. wait. Now all those in the last section, on the side, who have changed their mind, please move to the section you now belong. wait.

QUESTION (to all students): WHERE DID THE MOVEMENT OCCUR? Answer (deduced by students and discussed by Professor Burdick) FROM THE MIDDLE.

LESSON: YOU CANNOT CHANGE THE MIND OF SOMEONE WHOSE OPINIONS ARE BASED ON BELIEF.

(My take. Beliefs are not bad. It provides morality to groups of conversant organisms, to establish social order and cooperation within and without. Even non speaking animals have systems that provide order and imply some belief in what is right. The value of this lesson is to recognize when logic and conversation will no longer work. And to alter your plans of persuasion.)

since the individual speaking is inevitably the spinner, spin is unavoidable, both the good and the bad kind. But the spinners who get it right, those whose version of spin turns out to be consistent with what is happening out there; ie “the truth” or at least the mutually agreed upon version, are the ones who survive and prosper. Therein lies the value of truth and the shortcomings of individuals who cant help but spin.

Objective truth or reason may exist in theory, but even procesing through the senses is subjectivizing. There is a group that does regularly test their subjective ideas and are willing to change then when further evidence is presented. They are called scientists. Those who think or know they have found objective truths are orthodox polemicists. If you are Thomas Jefferson or John Locke, you can even write of self-evident truths. Makes great rhetoric, but dubious logic.
Even that was spin. What we have now is spin-overdose. In place of policy. Government by bumper-strip slogan. So keep it short. Stay the Course. Maybe enough of the people are sick and tired of it and are looking for substance.

The following is excerpted from an article I wrote in October, 2003. It is still not out of date,

When I was a kid, the term, “wise guy,” had a very special and specific meaning. A wise guy was a person who would borrow money, saying that it would be paid back on Thursday. When the lender tried to collect, he would be told, “I didn’t say this Thursday!” He always had a technicality, a verbal slight of hand, a sneaky twist of words, and did it all of the time.
Recently, I heard Vice President Cheney say in New Hampshire that “the income tax will be reduced.” Maybe so for the millionaires, but not for me. I would be willing to bet that he had his fingers crossed behind the podium. When most Americans think of “income tax,” they have in mind the money paid to Washington on April 15. When Cheney mentioned “income tax,” he referred to just that. The part he did not mention was that the payroll tax would be going up. Payroll tax constitutes Medicare, Social Security and all of the other stuff on our W-2s. Pure and simple: Cheney is a wise guy. So is George W. Bush. He prevents forest fires by cutting down all of the trees.
* About 1.5% of taxpayers now pay the Alternative Minimum Tax. Few people are familiar with it because it doesn’t apply for most of us. It was aimed at people who sneak *through various tax loopholes. That situation is about to change. By 2005, 33% of taxpayers will be socked with it, and they aren’t just people sneaking through loopholes. It will hit people like you and me…hard. The wise guys in Washington don’t tell us about this kind of stuff. It is true…they are reducing “Income Tax.” It is just spin; technically it’s the truth.
Over the course of my 64 years, I always thought the Republicans were about money, and the Democrats were the spenders. The rule doesn’t apply anymore. The Democrats balanced the budget, created a surplus even. The Republicans blew it. Read my lips: The Republicans are about POWER, and any way they can get it.
Traditionally, Congressional districts are reapportioned the year after a census. Texas redistricted in 2001. With a Republican majority in the Texas legislature, they decided to reapportion again in 2003, resulting in a flight of Democratic legislators to Oklahoma. They wanted to create 8 Republican Congressional seats by rigging the system. Remember the Homeland Security and Patriot Acts, designed to be used against terrorists? They were used to hunt down Texas Democrats and bring them to heel in Austin. Sounds like an abuse of power to me.
I won’t bore you with weapons of mass destruction, germ warfare, harmless little aluminum tubes, predator-type aircraft made of balsa wood with key wound motors or any of that batch of spin. Nor, will I address the destruction of a CIA agent’s cover and fictitious fables of Nigerian uranium deals.
Just remember that we’ve got a bunch of wise guys in the White House, with a siege mentality, and a very compliant Congress looking the other way. For some time now, I thought, “These guys are too stupid to put together a good conspiracy.” I was wrong.

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Stanley Fish is a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, in Miami. In the Fall of 2012, he will be Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of 15 books, most recently “Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others”; “How to Write a Sentence”; “Save the World On Your Own Time”; and “The Fugitive in Flight,” a study of the 1960s TV drama. “Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution” will be published in 2014.